thread: 2012-03-03 : Ben Lehman: Caveat Scriba: Margret Weis Productions
On 2012-03-04, Amberyl wrote:
Speaking in general, without knowledge of this specific situation:
What people seem to be missing here is that most of the RPG industry, whether "indie" or "corporate" operates at the level of a mom-and-pop business, working on shoestring budgets, dealing with uncertain levels of cash flow barely enough to allow the company to be a going concern, and done with enthusiasm but often not very much business sense.
As a freelancer, you should probably think of most of your potential employers as dubious credit risks. This is true even if the publisher has had a sequence of successful products, because many such publishers are only doing sufficiently well to be able to fund the next product, not to maintain a reasonable cash reserve.
Post-publication payment is an artifact of the cash flow issue. Publishers are scraping together sufficient cash to fund a print run, which means that they often have insufficient money to pay anyone until the cash starts coming back from the sales.
The possibility that the product gets killed before publication is always there. Your contract may specify a kill fee if this is the case, so you get some money, but for many RPG companies, there won't be one because the reason that there won't be a product is that they didn't have the funds to be able to publish the product, and consequently also no funds to pay people who worked on the product.
Side effect of operating on enthusiasm and not much business sense: The companies may not be great at keeping records on who they owe, how much they owe them, and when they owe them.
Cold fact, though, is that when companies have cash flow issues, they first pay the bills that keep the company running (paying the printers, the rent, and so on), and then figure out when they can pay freelancers, since individuals can be put off a bit with some pleading.
